Jared Malsin is a an editor at the English desk of the Ma'an News Agency, an independent Palestinian news network. He lives in the West Bank town of Beit Sahour.

Whether stereotyped as
terrorists or idolised as freedom fighters, Palestinians are not a people often
associated with nonviolence. In a world of checkpoints, airstrikes, squalid
refugee camps, and nightly raids by the Israeli Defence Forces, peaceful political means at times seem incommensurate with their ends. Yet, the Palestinian tradition of
nonviolence is both old and very much alive today.

In towns and villages all over
the West Bank, Palestinians demonstrate every
week, usually on Fridays after the noon prayer. The spirit and persistence of
these protests have generated a small international buzz about a nonviolent
resurgence in Palestine,
a return to the days of the First Intifada when a largely peaceful uprising
brought renewed attention to the Palestinian cause in the late 1980s.

From the frontlines Jared Malsin is a an editor at the English desk of the Ma'an News Agency,
an independent Palestinian news network. He lives in the West Bank town of Beit Sahour.

Hoping to gauge the alleged
revival of nonviolent resistance in Palestine, I
visited the small village of Al-Walajeh, four kilometres north of Bethlehem. Every Friday,
Al-Walajeh's residents gather in protest of the construction of the controversial
wall around the West Bank. The planned route
of a 30-foot high concrete section of the barrier will slice the village in
half. Shireen Al-Araj, a member of Al-Walajeh's municipal council, says the
wall, which has already been raised in parts of the village as a barbed wire
fence, will result in the annexation of much of the village's land by Israel.

One blazing hot September day,
the villagers, joined by eight Israeli anarchists, a young activist from Japan, and a
few elderly women with Christian Peacemaker Teams, prayed, then marched on the
construction site. They set about blocking the access road used by Israeli
construction vehicles. Israeli soldiers watched from their post higher on the
hillside, but held their fire. The protesters built mounds of rocks, sand, and
tree branches, eventually setting one of the piles ablaze: a literal firewall
against invading bulldozers and trucks.

With one road blocked, it was
time to unblock another. The demonstrators now scrambled down the hill, where
yet another group of soldiers waited. Inching my way down, I asked
fifteen-year-old Mohammad Adil Atrash what he hoped the action would say.

His answer: "Israel,
go away, we don't want you."

The IDF soldiers below decided
to retreat. Unlike most demonstrations that take place in the West
Bank, it appeared this one would be spared the routine barrage of
teargas and rubber-coated bullets. Gathering now on the road, the villagers turned
to remove a roadblock separating Al-Walajeh from nearby Beit Jala.

Al-Araj, a powerful, straight-talking woman in big black sunglasses and a hijab, says the roadblock makes the
journey to Beit Jala, and therefore to Bethlehem,
the only town of any size in this part of the West Bank,
twice as long.

Straining with every muscle,
women and men, from young Mohammad to the very old, laboured with shovels,
metal rods, and their bare hands to clear mounds plowed up by Israeli
construction vehicles. After an hour's hard toil, the last boulders rolled away with
a cheer from the crowd and a cathartic cloud of dust. Moments later, a small
white sedan drove through the newly cleared roadway.

Catching her breath in between
moving boulders, Al-Araj seems satisfied but recognises the Sisyphean character
of her struggle. "The [Israeli] army will rebuild it later this week,"
she says. "And we will come back the next week to remove it again."

This is the nature of
nonviolent resistance in the occupied territories. Demonstrators can block construction
vehicles - temporarily. They can confront the Israeli army, until the IDF
flexes its greatly superior physical might and scatters protesters. Roadblocks
can be removed - until they are replaced by more roadblocks.

Even "victory," as hailed
by the people of Al-Walajeh and other villages is bittersweet - activists like
Al-Araj "do not agree with the idea of the wall in principle," but
nonetheless the Palestinian villagers know they have to accommodate the barrier
in the concrete. Along with physical resistance, the villagers have pursued legal
advocacy through institutional channels, demanding a change in the eventual
routes of the wall.

In early September, the Israeli
Supreme Court ruled in favour of a petition brought by residents of the village of Bil'in, about a one hour drive from
Ramallah. For the last two years, weekly demonstrations in Bil'in have made the
village an international poster-child for the contemporary Palestinian
struggle. By last July, when I first visited Bil'in, the demonstrations seemed
to draw more keffiyeh-clad protesters from the US
and France than Palestinians
from the West Bank. Yet, whatever the composition
of the crowd, Bil'in never fails to draw a hail of rubber bullets and clouds of
tear gas from the IDF soldiers who disperse the demonstrations week after week.

The Bil'in case was not the
first in which the Israeli courts have ordered the route of the wall changed,
but it has produced more exuberance than any other ruling. Many activists were
quick to hail the court decision as a sign that the winds were changing in Palestine. Awni Jubran, a
Palestinian activist with the Bethlehem-based Holy Land Trust suggested that it
marked a step on the way to the creation of a "nonviolent culture"
where violence has long been entangled with politics.

Some international
commentators have looked to the Bil'in ruling as a sign of a trend, a "dramatic
transformation" in the Palestinian struggle, leading to the formation of a
full-fledged popular struggle against the Wall and the occupation at large. "This
is a new stage for us," said Bil'in committee leader Muhammad Khatib, "another
indication of how the demonstrations are becoming a broader-based popular
movement."

Blast from the past?

What many commentators and
activists want, explicitly or emotionally, is a return to the moral force of
the First Intifada, the heyday of Palestinian popular struggle. The uprising of
1987-91 challenged Israel's
monopoly on world sympathies with images of general strikes and stone-throwing
children confronting Israeli tanks.

Where the uprising was the
strongest, including villages like Beit Sahour, just south of Bethlehem, Palestinians refused to pay
Israeli taxes, handed in their Israeli ID cards, and grew their own food in an
effort to boycott Israeli goods.

But calls for a popular
uprising on the model of the First Intifada now come across as wishful
thinking, and even veteran nonviolent activists wonder what today's protests
can accomplish. Even "victory" in all 79 villages and towns affected
by the construction of the wall would only mark a small gain in the overall
Palestinian predicament, which increasingly looks like checkmate in favour of
the occupation.

Protests against the wall "are
only responding to the crisis created by Israel," noted George
Rishmawi, an activist and advocate based in Beit Sahour. He argues that the
completion of the wall will allow Israel to perfect its strategy of
releasing some Palestinian lands while permanently appropriating other tracts.
The checkpoints and roadblocks on the interior of the West
Bank are "temporary measures - they will be removed when the
Wall is completed."

Keeping the settlements while
sealing off the rest of the West Bank into a patchwork of economically
helpless, noncontiguous mini-entities allows Israel to complete a policy of "withdrawal"
already in practice in the Gaza Strip, a process that began with the Olso
accords.

Controlling the "way we resist"

What this looks like in
practice is an ideal colonial situation: open air prisons with no need for a
large occupying force. Israel
would then be immune to Bil'in-style demonstrations. With no soldiers present, drama
will be drained from physical protest, with Palestinians left to chant slogans
at a concrete wall. In Rishmawi's words, completion of the wall will allow Israel "to
direct the way we resist."

The Gaza Strip, for example, is
one place where nonviolent action has been eroded by the Israeli "disengagement."
Israel still control's Gaza's borders, airspace, tax system, sea coast, and most
other dimensions of life, and still raid Palestinian cities, all without the
daily physical presence of occupation.

With the settlers gone and
Israeli forces no longer patrolling the streets, Gazans are already living the
anti-political dystopia Rishmawi predicts for the West
Bank. This leaves the business of resistance in the hands of armed
fighters, whose homemade projectiles bombard neighbouring Israeli towns, causing
more hysteria than actual damage.

Faced with such a bleak
situation, the nonviolent resistance movement in Palestine, cannot aspire to achieve complete
liberation for the Palestinian people. What is clear to Palestinian activists,
however, is that Israeli policies will not change at all without protest. The
only places where the route of the wall has changed, Stop the Wall researcher
Dawood Hamoudeh stressed to me, are in villages like Bil'in where there have
been stubborn protests.

A right to politics

Nonviolent resistance is
therefore working within the barest of margins allowed by Israel's seemingly immutable system
of control. The role of nonviolent action is to contest, to "denaturalise"
a regime that has continuously adapted to sixty years of Palestinian resistance.
Simply to challenge the inevitability of Israeli control is a significant step
at this stage. Protests against the construction of the wall are, in a sense,
demanding the right to protest in the first place, the right to politics.

The Palestinian slogan "to
resist is to exist" could easily be reversed to say "to exist is to
resist." As Rishmawi and other activists point out, for many Palestinians,
simply remaining on their land and in their houses is a form of resistance. For
example, in the West Bank city of Hebron,
militant Israeli settlers have succeeded in driving Palestinians out of much of
the old city center. A few stubbornly remain, though they are unable even to
walk the streets that lead to their houses. Metal cages fortify the exteriors
of their homes against the rocks, garbage, and even bottles of urine that the
settlers hurl at them.

The same stubbornness, the same
determination underlies the demonstrations in villages like Bil'in and
Al-Walajeh. On 15 October, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert publicly
contemplated giving up some of the towns and villages that have been all but
annexed in Israel's idea of "greater
Jerusalem."
One of the villages he named was Al-Walajeh.

Marwan Fararjeh, another organiser
with the Holy Land Trust, dismissed Olmert's words as empty: "What Israel will do
is build the wall just around the houses, annexing the rest of the land. When Israel
gives up all the land, I will believe them." Fararjeh may very well be
right. Yet, Olmert's mention of a tiny Palestinian village, unknown to most Israelis,
does in a muted way mark the effect of the demonstrations there. Nonviolent
resistance is critical in beginning to unsettle an occupation that appears, at
first, as unmovable as the boulders in Al-Walajeh's roadblocks.